Visual Office
A virtual office floor plan for your team's Slack
Although I had a handful of paying customers, I ended up shutting down Visual Office. The main driving force was bad founder-product fit. The prospects who were most excited by this tool were ones who wanted to monitor their employees in a way that I felt uncomfortable with (i.e. if your employees are getting their work done, why do you care if they are on slack?).
Since it also wasn't break even yet, I decided to shut it down to focus on my main business, WrestlingIQ.
Well, my product hunt launch hasn't done super well (although I am 1000% grateful to the people who have upvoted it... it warms my heart).
However, Visual Office was featured in the 'New & Noteworthy' section in the Slack App directory. Not sure how many users that will drive, but hopefully at least a couple trials :fingers_crossed:
So far trial users are finding Visual Office to be a little too unobtrusive. One of the key things I've heard is that there is no reason for an employee to update their virtual location. They essentially get nothing out of it!
Adding a daily standup to Visual Office's feature set is my first attempt at a recurring reason to visit the app home page within Slack, and also provides network effect value to everyone on your team (aka you get to have a sense of what everyone else is working on).
Today Visual Office was officially approved to be listed in the Slack app store: https://slack.com/apps/A011VMZC03W-visual-office
The process was a fairly involved one, with their app checklist extremely involved. It was simultaneously tedious but also quite helpful and their response time was excellent (turned around in under 7 days for two reviews).
I'm not sure how much of a boost I should expect marketing wise from the Slack App Directory, but seemed like an obvious first step.
Finalized the early access feature set for Visual Office and launched it to my launch list this morning. Ended up going with a 14 day free trial, and a slightly discounted price for early access users.
I guess now I actually need to write the code to actually charge people? Fingers crossed for a few conversions in 14 days :fingers_crossed:
Subscribers have continued to trickle in slowly since the big spike from BetaList. Hope to send out first beta invites this week (app is almost ready to go!).
Once I've got the beta users who have committed onboarded I'll be shifting my focus to the early access program, which will be a soft launch with a free trial.
BetaList listing drove the most traffic. HN and Product Hunt were duds with Reddit driving some trickle on traffic.
Hoping to get to 100, but I am now actively working on getting this product into beta shape. I've decided to try to get people to pre purchase two months of the beta up front to suss out whether this is worth paying money to them or not.
The idea for Visual Office got stuck in my head while out on a run. I couldn't shake it, and had just bought TailwindUI, so I promptly decided to create a landing page.
At this point, I'll submit it to a few places and see if anything sticks. If no one is interested, it can be abandoned without regret.
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